West Coast Woo: Of Bricks and Bigots

It's 8:21pm as I begin this, and I'm sitting at 'my' kitchen table next to the two lovely big windows, and it's still freaking light out. Tis a bit windy - I just came in from a longish walk up Eureka - all the way to the very highest point maybe ten blocks west, over one street to Collingwood, and back again, and I tell you, the views ... the views! When you're up that high and then you turn around to head back, all around you are nothing but fantastic old SF houses, and the valleys that now surround you on all sides. Absolutely amazing, particularly around sunset. Man, the pics I got.

NOT TO MENTION, OF COURSE, THE HOUSES !!

Anyway ... in light of my earlier entry/rant re gay rights and the nauseating shit that went down in North Carolina the other day, I thought it appropriate and timely to also post photos I took just now of a bunch of sidewalk bricks that are in front of the building one over from me at 150 Eureka, which belong to the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco.

In an atmosphere, still in 2012, where these people are being denounced, where still idiots are saying that AIDS won't be cured because it's god's punishment on homos, where young gay kids are still killing themselves at a hugely higher rate, where these folks are still getting gay bashed - there were two bashings right here, right in this neighborhood last week - and mostly in an atmosphere where it's somehow still acceptable to actively work and vote to deny these fellow taxpayers their basic civil rights ie marriage/adoption/inheritance/hospital visitation, etc etc., I think it would be highly instructive for the North Carolina bigots and bumpkins and their ilk to take a simple, 5 minute gander at these sidewalk bricks, seeing as they don't apparently believe gay people are human, or as human as they are, or worthy of equal respect; they don't think they have families and partners and spouses and kids and people that love them, like anybody else.

In short, I found these incredibly moving and beautiful. They quickly and cleanly put the lie to the bullshit spouted by the right. And to think of the history of what these people have been through, in this very neighborhood - in these very same houses - in the house I'm in right now, perhaps - when AIDS hit, and how it ravaged this community and that they went through it almost entirely on their own for the first few years when Reagan couldn't have given a shit that young, previously healthy men were literally dropping like flies, left and right, of the gruesome-est possible things - stuff that sometimes had never before been seen in humans - and nobody knew in the beginning what the hell was causing it, and hence, how in the world to protect themselves. Here is a bit from the church's own website, about this:

It is impossible to overstate the impact of HIV/AIDS on the life of MCCSF during those years when there were no effective treatments for HIV. During the peak of the crisis, it was not uncommon for there to be three or four funerals on each day of the weekend, and growth in church membership could barely keep pace with the rate of deaths. And yet, even in the midst of this virtually unbearable period, the church persevered, with fellow members supporting one another during the most painful times, and the church served on the vanguard of advocacy efforts for people living with HIV/AIDS.

I had no idea btw until I read it just now that this church was started by gay folks, back in 1970.

Imagine!

A homo church!

Blasphemy!

Anyway, it's with that historical perspective, and bearing in mind the current battle over gay marriage and even 'domestic partnership', ie a battle, again, over basic civil, and human rights, which NC just decided to strike down, and the persistent inability of some to apparently see these folks as fully human, because that's the only things that explains this shit, that helps lend such poignancy and beauty and truth to the words that these homos left for and about each other over the years, in public, on a sidewalk: